BY ARCHIBALD GEIKIE, LL.D., F.R.S.,

Director-General of the Geological Surveys of Great Britain and Ireland.

IN TWO PARTS-PART L

|

scales, teeth, and bones of uncouth fishes, all embedded in the heart of the stone, and drawn out of a subterranean territory of almost fabulous extent and gloom. Could anything more marvellous have been suggested to a youthful fancy? The caverns of the Genii, even that of the Wonderful Lamp, seemed not more to be coveted. At least the new cave had this great advantage over the old ones, that I was sure it was really true; a faint suspicion having begun to arise that, possibly, after all, the Eastern caverns might have no more tangible existence than on the pages of the story-book. But here, only four miles from my own door, was a real cavern, mysterious beyond the power of my friends to describe, inhabited by living men wno toiled like gnomes, with murky faces and little lamps on their foreheads, driving wagons, and blasting open the rock in vast and seemingly impenetrable galleries, where the sullen reverberations boomed as it were for miles among endless gigantic pillars and sheets of Stygian water and stretched away deep and dark into fathomless gloom. And in that rock, wrapped up in its substance like mummies in their cerements, lay heaps of plants of wondrous kinds; some resembled those of our woods and streams, but there

generate and wholly unworthy the dignity of | with wonders-plants of strange form, with a schoolboy. Besides, we had always plenty of work of some kind to fill up the time, and what the nature of that work was to be for the ensuing Saturday had usually been determined long before the covet d Saturday came. Sometimes, if the weather was dull, my comrades repaired to my room (which was dignified as "the workshop") to hear a disquisition on the last invention, or to help if they could in removing some troublesome and apparently insuperable mechanical difficulty. Or we planned a glorious game of cricket, or golf, or football, that seldom came to a close until the evening grew too dark for longer play. In spring-time we would sally forth into the country to some well-remembered bank, where the primroses and violets bloomed earliest, and return at dusk, bringing many a bunch for those at home. The summer afternoons often found us loitering, rod in hand, along the margin of a shady streamlet, in whose deeper pools the silvery troutlets loved to feed. And it fed, truly, with little danger from us. The writhing worm (we never soared to the use of the fly), though ever so skilfully and unfeelingly twined round the hook, failed to allure the scaly brood, which we could see darting up and down the current without so much as a nibble at our tempting bait. Not so, how-wer: many, the like to which my companions ever, with another member of that tribe, the ittle stickleback, or "beardie," as we called , to which we had the most determined and unreasonable antipathy. The cry of "A beardie! a beardie!" from one of cur party was the sign for every rod and stick to be thrown down on the bank, and a general rush to the spot where the enemy of the trout had been seen. Off went stockings and shoes, and in plunged the wearer, straight to the large stone in mid-channel under which the foe was supposed to be lurking. Cautiously were the fingers passed into the crevices and round the base of the stone, and the little victim, fairly caught at last in his den, was thrown in triumph to the bank, where many a stone was at hand to end his torments and his life.

Autumn brought round the cornfields, and the hedgerows rich in hip, and haw, and bramble; and then, dear to the heart of schoolboy, came winter with its sliding, skating, and snowballing, and its long, merry evenings, with their rounds of festivity and plumcake.

'Tis an old story, truly; but I remember as if it had been yesterday, how my Saturday employments were changed, and how the vagrant, careless fancies of the schoolboy passed into the settled purposes that have moulded the man. I had passed a Saturday afternoon alone, and next day as usual met my comrades at church. On comparing notes, I found that the previous afternoon they had set out for some lime-quarries, about four miles off, and had returned laden

declared that even in our longest rambles they had never seen on bank, or brake, or hill; fishes, too, there were, with strong, massive scales, very different from our trouts and minnows. Some of the spiny fins, indeed, just a little resembled those of our foe the "beardie." Very likely (thought I) the Genius of the cave being a sensible fellow, has resolved to preserve his trout, and so with a murrain on the beardies has buried them bodily in the rock.

But above all, in these dark subterranean recesses lurked the remains of gigantic reptiles; and one of the quarrymen possessed a terrific tusk and some fragmentary scales, which he would have sold to my friends could their joint purse have supplied the stipulated price.

My interest in the tale, of course, increased at every new incident; but when they came to talk of reptiles, the exuberant fancy could contain itself no longer. "Dragons! dragons!" I shouted, and rubbed my hands in an ecstacy of delight. "Dragons, boys, be sure they are, that have been turned into stone by the magic of some old necromancer."

They had found, too, in great abundance, what they had been told were "coprolites that is, as we afterwards learnt, the petrified excrement of ancient fishes. "Copper-lites, " thought I, nay, perchance it might be gold; for who ever read of such a famous cavern with petrified forests, fishes, and dragons, that had not besides huge treasures of yellow gold?

So there and then we planned an excursion

for the following Saturday. he days that intervened stretched themselves somehow to an interminable length. It seemed the longest week of my life, even though every sleeping and waking hour was crowded with visions of the wondrous caverns. At length the long expected morning dawned, and son brightened up into a clear, calm autumnal day.

We started off about noon; a goodly band of some eight or nine striplings, with two or three hammers, and a few pence amongst us, and no need to be home before dusk. An October sun shone merrily out upon us; the fields, bared of their sheaves, had begun to be again laid under the plough, and long lines of rich brown loam alternated with bands of yellow stubble up and down which toiled many a team of steaming horses. The neighboring woods, gorgeous in their tints of green, gold, and russet, sent forth clouds of rooks, whose noisy jangle, borne onward by the breeze, and mingling with the drone of the bee and the carol of the lark, grew mellow in the distance, as the cadence of a far-off hymn. We were too young to analyze the landscape, but not too young to find in every feature of it the intensest enjoyment. Moreover, our path lay through a district rich in historic associations. Watch-peels, castles, and towers looked out upon us as we walked, each with its traditionary tales, the recital of which formed one of our chief delights. Or if a castle lacked its story, our invention easily supplied the defect. And thus every part of the way came to be memorable in our eyes for some thrilling event, real or imaginarybattles, stern and bloody, fierce encounters in single combat, strange weird doings of antique wizards, and marvelous achievements of steel-clad knights, who rambled restlessly through the world to deliver imprisoned maidens.

panions rushed down the slope with a shout of triumph. For myself, I lingered a moment on the top. With just a tinge of sadness in the thought, I felt that though striking and picturesque beyond anything of the kind I had ever seen, this cavern was after all only a piece of human handiwork. The heaps of rubbish around me, with the smoking kilns at the one end and the clanking engine at the other, had no connection with beings of another world, but told only too plainly of ingenious, indefatigable man. The spell was bro en at once and forever, and as it fell to pieces, I darted down the slope and rejoined my comrades.

They had already entered the cave, which was certainly vast and gloomy enough for whole legions of gnomes. The roof, steep as that of a house, sloped rapidly into the hillside beneath a murky sheet of water, and was supported by pillars of wide girth, some of which had a third of their height, or more, concealed by the lake, so that the cavern, with its inclined roof and pillars, half sunk in the water, looked as though it had been rent and submerged by some old earthquake. Not a vestige of vegetation could we see save, near the entrance, some dwarfed scolopendriums and pale patches of moss. an insect, nor indeed any living thing seemed ever to venture into this dreary den. Away it stretched to the right hand and the left, in long withdrawing vistas of gloom, broken, as we could faintly see, by the light which, entering from other openings along the hillside, fell here and these on some hoary pillar, and finally vanished into the shade.

Not

It is needless to recall what achievements we performed; how, with true boyish hardihood, we essayed to climb the pillars, or crept along the ledges of rock that overhung the murky water, to let a ponderous stone fall plump into the depths, and mark how long the bubbles continued to rise gurgling to the surface, and how long the reverberations of the plunge came floating back to us from the far-off recesses of the cave. Enough that, having satisfied our souls with the wonders below ground, we set out to explore those above.

Thus beguiled, the four miles seemed to shrink into one, and we arrived at length at the quarries. They had been opened, I found, along the slope of a gentle declivity. At the north end stood the kilns where the lime was burnt, the white smoke from which we used to see some miles away. About a quarter of a mile to the south "But where are the petrified forests and lay the workings where my com-fishes?" cried one of the party. "Here!" rades had seen the subterranean men; "Here!" was shouted in reply from the top of and there, too, stood the engine that the bank by two of the ringleaders of the drew up the wagons and pumped out the previous Saturday. We made for the heap water. Between the engine and the kilns of broken stones whence the voices had the hillside had all been mined and exhaust-come, and there, truly, on every block and ed; the quarrymen having gradually exca- every fragment the fossils met our eye, somevated their way southwards to where we saw times so thickly grouped together that we the smoking chimney of the engine-house. could barely see the stone on which they lay. We made for a point midway in the excava- I bent over the mound, and the first fragtions; and great indeed was our delight, on men. that turned up (my first-found fossil) climbing long bank of grass-grown rubbish, was one that excited the deepest interest. to see below us a green hollow, and beyond The commander-in-chief of the first excurit a wall of rock, in the centre of which sion, who was regarded (perhaps as much yawned a deep cavern, plunging away into from his bodily stature as for any other reathe hill far from the light of day. My com-son) an authority on these questions, pro

say, than ever perturbed the brain of a geoiogist. It did not occur at the time to any of us to inquire why a perch came to be embalmed among ivy and rose leaves; why a sea-shore whelk lay entwined in the arms of a butterfly; or why a beetle should seem to have been doing his utmost to dance a pir

nounced my treasure-trove to be, unmistaka-eration of organic remains, I will venture to bly and unequivocally, a fish. True, it seemed to lack head and tail and fins; the liveliest fancy amongst us hesitated as to which were the scales; and in after years I learned that it was really a vegetable-the seed-cone or catkin of a large extinct kind of club-moss; but, in the meantime, Tom had declared it to be a fish, and a fish it must as-ouette round the tooth of a fish. These quessuredly be.

tions came all to be asked afterward, and then I saw how egregiously erroneous had been our boyish identifications. But, in the meantime, knowing little of the subject, I believed everything, and with implicit faith piled up dragon-flies, ferns, fishes, beetle cases, violets, sea-weeds, and shells.

The shadows of twilight had begun to fall while we still bent eagerly over the stones The sun, with a fiery glare, had sunk behind the distant hills, and the long lines of ruddy light that mottled the sky as he went down had crept slowly after him, and left the clouds to come trooping up from the east, cold, lifeless, and gray. The chill of evening now began to fall over everything, save the spirits of the treasure-seekers. And yet they too in the end succumbed. The ring of the hammer became less frequent, and the shout that announced the discovery of each fresh marvel seldomer broke the stillness o the scene. And, as the moanings of the night-wind swept across the fields, and rustled fitfully among the withered weeds of the quarry, it was wisely :esolved that we should all go home.

The halo that broke forth from the Wizard's tomb when William Deloraine and the Monk of St. Mary's heaved at midnight the ponderous stone was surely not brighter, certainly not so benign in its results, as the light that now seemed to stream into my whole being, as I disinterred from their stony folds these wondrous relics. Like other schoolboys, I had, of course, had my lessons on geology in the usual meagre, cut-and-dry form in which physical science was then taught in our schools. I could repeat a "Table of Formations," and remember the pictures of some unconth monsters on the pages of our text-books-one with goggle. eyes, no neck, and a preposterous tail; another with an unwieldy body, and no tail at all, for which latter d fect I had endeavored to compensate by inserting a long pipe into his mouth, receiving from our master (Ironsides, we called him) a hearty rap across the knuckles, as a recompense for my attention to the creature's comfort. But the notion that these pictures were the representations of actual, though now extinct monsters, that the matter-of-fact details of our text-books really Then came the packing up. Each had symbolized living truths, and were not in- amassed a pile of specimens, well-nigh as vented solely to distract the brains and en- large as himself, and it was of course imposdanger the palms of schoolboys; nay, that sible to carry everything away. A rapid sethe statements which seemed so dry and un-lection had therefore to be made. And oh! intelligible in print were such as could be with how much reluctance were we compelled actually verified by our own eyes in nature, to relinquish many of the stones, the disthat beneath and beyond the present crea-covery whereof had made the opposite cavern tion, in the glories of which we revelled, there ring again with our jubilee. Not one of us lay around us the memorials of other crea- had had the foresight to provide himself with tions not less glorious, and infinitely older, a bag, so we stowed away the treasures in our and thus that more, immensely more, than pockets. Surely pr ctical geometry offers not our books or our teachers taught us could be a more perplexing problem than to gauge the learnt by looking at nature for ourselves-all capacity of these parts of a schoolboy's dress. this was strange to me. It came now for the So we loaded ourselves to the full, and first time like a new revelation, one that has marched along with the fossils crowded into gladdened my life ever since. every available corner.

We worked on industriously at the rubbish heap, and found an untold sum of wonders. The human mind in its earlier stages dwells on resemblances, rather than on differences. We identified what we found in the stones with that to which it most nearly approached in existing nature, and though many ansorganism turned up to which we could think of no analogue, we took no trouble to discriminate wherein it differed from others. Hence, to our imagination, the plants, insects, shells, and fishes of our rambles met us again in the rock. There was little that some one of the party could not explain, and thus our limestone became a more extraordinary conglom

Despite our loads, we left the quarry in high glee. Arranging ourselves instinctively into a concave phalanx, with the speaker in the centre, we resumed a tale of thrilling interest, that had come to its most tragic part just as we arrived at the quarry several hours before. It lasted all the way back, beguiling the tedium, darkness, and chill of the four miles that lay between the limeworks and our homes; and the final consummation of the story was artfully reached just as we came to the door of the first of the party who had to wish us good night.

Such was my first geological excursiona simple event enough, and yet the turning.